The Analysis of Metadiscourse Elements in Medical Articles by Native and Non-Native Writers

Metadiscourse is typically used as an umbrella term to include a heterogeneous assortment of cohesive and interpersonal feature which helps related a text to its context through assisting readers to connect, organize and interpret materials in a way preferred by the writer and with respect to the understanding and values of a particular discourse community (Hyland 1998). Regarding the fact that metadiscourse markers are known as the most noticeable discourse organizers bringing about increased levels of awareness and engagement in addressees, it takes shapes according to the rhetorical context in which it is used and the pragmatic functions it accomplishes. The aim of the present study was to examine the use of metadiscourse markers in English medical research articles in ISI English journals by Iranian authors and English native speakers in English. The corpus consists of 49669 words from ten research articles in English written by native English and Iranian non-native speakers. The corpus was coded based on Hyland and Tse’s (2004) taxonomy of metadiscourse. Descriptive and inferential statistics were conducted for data analyses. The findings show that interactive metadiscourse markers were the most frequently used compared to interpersonal metadiscourse markers. In other words, text coherence, or understandability of the text, which is mostly attained through the adequate use of the interactive metadiscourse markers seems to be the primary goal of the writers of both groups, regardless of their native language. Sounds like knowing the above mentioned fact will help both students to improve their writing ability and teachers to moderate their subjectivity in correcting writing tasks of multi-cultural classes.